Good morning…
“Sue,” she emailed after yesterday’s post, When Our Old Life Ends. “I awake these days into your sacred hours…4AM…sometimes with clear knowledge of what I must do this day…this morning with a practical breakthrough of thought…and also deep journaling about my gratitude for the abundant surround sound love and support I am being blessed with…and some gradual acknowledgement of this step in a long goodbye. Our old life ending. (She has settled her husband into his memory care apartment this week.) I see his clothes hanging here in anticipation of a familiar attention that will never be again. Like loyal puppies awaiting their master who is now elsewhere. His desk…my new command post for the management of the new business of our lives. I have been operating from the dining room table…never dawning on me to set up this unwanted shop in his office. Now it is dawning on me.”
“I take this next step with an intention to honor him in his anchoring, organized way…tending to things…dealing,” she mused. “Like that Chinese symbol for crisis, one face looking into the loss and sadness…the other into the new reality and choosing its possibility. Before I try to return to sleep, I read your beautiful post and felt it speak right into my particular place and heart. Thank you for so beautifully expressing our butterfly truths and for grounding me in Jesus and his story…our rock and our foundation. He lived the way and shows us how. I follow.”
“These words are so well crafted and deeply, deeply touching,” I responded. “You are a gorgeous writer, expressing truth so tenderly, with such vivid detail. What would you think about me posting these loving words anonymously? I think so many can relate to the feeling of waking up into a new life phase, wandering around in the remnants of a beloved life that will never be the same. Could it be both “never the same” and somehow renewed with freedom to trust God more deeply?”
“Oh Sue, please feel free to post,” she replied after waking from her second sleep. “If my words can support another I am grateful. And…I feel they belong with all of us…God’s people all. I love your words…wandering around the remnants of a beloved life that will never be the same. I shall write those in my journal. I am so blessed that my dear dear friend’s own words blessed me at 4 this morning. I love you.”
“I love you too,” my fingers whisper.
Everything in the world is about to be wrapped up, so take nothing for granted. Stay wide-awake in prayer. Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it (1 Peter 4:7, MSG).
…Sue…
